When the Darkness Falls

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When the Darkness Falls Page 29

by Gonzalez, J. F.


  So, whaddaya say?

  Later!

  Julie

  *

  Subj: Intrigued

  Date: 3/14/01 5:13 PM Pacific Standard Time

  From [email protected](Jesus Gonzalez)

  To: [email protected] (Julie Stewart)

  Okay, I’m intrigued. “Really need the help” and “I have nobody else to turn to” tell me that this is serious. Nice to hear that after not being in contact with you for almost twenty years, you’re able to trust me so readily. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, either; we were friends then, and I’m sorry we lost touch. I’m glad to be back in touch with you again and will listen to anything you have to say.

  I’m all ears,

  Jesus

  J. F. Gonzalez

  http://members.aol.com/phantasmjg

  *

  Subj: What happened at Forest Green Cemetery, Part One

  Date: 3/14/01 5:45 PM Pacific Standard Time

  From: [email protected] (Julie Stewart)

  To: [email protected] (Jesus Gonzalez)

  Thanks! I knew that even though we haven’t seen or spoken to each other in almost twenty years that I could confide in you. You were one of my best friends in high school, and I knew the minute I saw your name up at Classmates.com that I could come to you with this.

  Before I begin I suppose I should preface this by warning you right off the bat about two things: (1) I am fucking scared to death and (2), in the event I can’t finish this e-mail I’m just hitting the send button. So if the last e-mail I send to you doesn’t end with my customary ‘Later!’ you’ll know that I’m history. No, I won’t be dead, but...well, I’ll explain it later. One other thing: don’t tell me where you live now. That’s a warning right off the bat. DON’T!

  Another thing you should know: I’m writing this on my laptop, in some hotel room somewhere in Kansas. I actually stayed here last night and all day today, getting some rest. I’ve been on the run since Saturday and had to rest for a day or so. I really don’t know where else to go, but I have to keep going. If I stay in one place for too long I think he’s going to take over. If I stayed at home I was afraid of what I might do to my husband and my son.

  Okay, you’re probably freaking out now, thinking what the fuck is wrong with you, Julie! Whatever you do, don’t call the cops. There’s nothing they can do anyway. All they’ll do is take a look at my record (mostly for drugs; more on that later) and that’s not going to help. They’ll just think I’ve back-slid into using again, and that all I’m going to relate to you is drug induced. I’m telling you right now that is BULLSHIT. I am of clean and sober mind as I write this. And I intend to stay that way. All I want you to do is read these and SAVE THESE E-MAILS. These e-mails are the only evidence, the only documentation, of what has happened. I’m sorry, Jesus, but the minute I saw your name on Classmates.com, I knew I could rely on you to receive these messages. I feel bad that I’m using you in this way, but...believe me, I don’t mean it to be this way. If things had been different I wouldn’t be doing this, but I really need somebody to read these and save them. I don’t know anybody else that would; not my friends, not my in-laws, and certainly not my own fucking family. I don’t trust any of them more than I can throw them.

  Okay, enough of that. Time to take the plunge.

  Remember Mark Sawyer, Brent Katsamata, Tina Aguilare, and Joel Brandt? I know you and Brent hung out, and you probably knew the others as well (I know you’re probably thinking this has to do with what happened to Mark and Tina and it does). Well, as you probably remember, I used to hang out with them when we were juniors. We used to spend most of our first and second periods of school getting stoned over at Forest Green Cemetery. If you remember, that was the party place for us social outcasts. It was either that or go to John Burke’s place occasionally when his parents weren’t home. I remember seeing you at John’s a few times. Christ, it was in his bedroom that we got stoned that one morning and one thing led to another and...well, I hope if anything that single memory will bring a smile to your face. :)

  Anyway, as you know, I used to get righteously fucked up with them. There was so much shit going on at home with my dad and sisters that I didn’t give a shit about school, or myself. I suppose if I had, I would have cared more about myself and maybe I would have cared more about what happened to me later.

  Okay, here it is then. Enough fucking around. I’m going to tell you everything from the beginning.

  It must have been May or June of 1981. It was toward the end of the semester, so I think it was June. Joel had scored some great weed at a Rush concert the night before, so we went over to Forest Green Cemetery to get stoned. Joel and Brent were telling us about the show—you went, didn’t you?—and we were passing the pipe back and forth, taking hits. Joel was getting real philosophical, and he was talking about Jung, and the hemispheres of the brain, and just a bunch of stuff about where we all came from. Shit like that. Brent was actually getting into it, and the conversation turned to the gravestones we were sitting on, and we started reading the names off. Joel got this bright idea to see how far back the graves go and like a bunch of stoned morons, we went along with him. We weren’t even thinking that the oldest grave we’d find was probably from 1925!

  So we’re walking along, just reading the names and the dates on the stones, wondering who the people were. There were a lot of people there that died in the forties, and now that I think about it I wonder if they were in World War II? Most of the death dates were from the 40’s through the 70’s, and there were some recent ones as well. Still, some of the stones looked ancient, even though they really weren’t that old. And some of the older graves, those of people buried in the 1940’s and 1930’s, had stones that still looked brand new. Wonder why some stones fade quicker than others?

  Anyway, so we’re going along and we stop by this one marker and I still remember the name: Archibald Lasher. What a name, huh? It’s the kind of name that leaps out at you, and it leaped out at us. Tina started wondering if they called him ‘Archie,’ and I suppose in the ‘20’s they had. He died in September (don’t remember the day) of 1928. He was thirty-four years old when he died.

  So we’re talking about him (and remember, we were really stoned; you know how smoking pot always turned us into blabbermouths), and Brent starts wondering what kinda guy he was, and we just...fixated on that. We were intensely interested in this Archibald Lasher—who he was, how did he die. I mean, there were probably a couple thousand graves at Forest Green Cemetery and here we were focused on just one guy!

  We started guessing what might have been his story. Tina thought maybe he was killed in a car accident. Mark thought maybe he might have gotten murdered. Brent’s idea was the most logical. Being that Brent’s Japanese, he knew quite a lot about Gardena—if you remember from our junior high school local history classes, Gardena was a farming community in the early part of the 20th century, and landowners often employed the Japanese to work their farms. Many of those same Japanese later bought the land and settled in the area, which is why Gardena has a very heavy Japanese-American population.

  Anyway, enough of the history lesson. Brent’s theory was that maybe the guy was a local farmer or a ranch hand that was killed in an accident. A plausible theory, don’t you think? It was Joel who had the bright idea of coming back later that night with a Ouija board to try to contact the guy’s spirit.

  I can hear you already: you’re thinking that I’m trying to pin something as stupid as playing with a Ouija board with what happened to Mark and Tina. I wish I could say that were true. As things turned out, we didn’t need a Ouija board to result in what happened to Mark and Tina, but that’s a theory I’ll expound upon later in my story.

  Okay, this e-mail is already getting long. Part two is coming next.

  Later!

  Julie

  *

  Subj: What happened at Forest Green Cemetery, Part Two

  Date: 3/14/01 6:16 PM Pacific S
tandard Time

  From: [email protected] (Julie Stewart)

  To: [email protected] (Jesus Gonzalez)

  Okay, continuing where I left off...

  We left the cemetery and finally showed up at school around 10:30. I think I may have only gone to one class that day. I left at lunch and got stoned again at Michelle Kimoka’s house. I don’t remember what I did the rest of the day. If you’d done as much pot and acid as I did back then, you wouldn’t remember either. Christ, it’s a wonder I’ve got any functional gray matter left after all the shit I’ve done, huh?

  I do remember Joel called me later that night. He said he’d gone to the library and had done some research, reading micro-film of the Gardena Valley News, trying to find information about Archibald Lasher. And guess what? Ol’ Archibald was killed all right—he was hung at San Quentin!

  Joel told us the story later that night at his house, in the garage where we often hung out and smoked. Archibald Lasher had been arrested and convicted in 1928 for 12 brutal murders spanning four months, all of them committed in the Gardena/Torrance areas. He actually brought one of his victims almost to the same spot where he was later buried. Weird, huh? Keep in mind that those areas of Los Angeles weren’t that well built up yet. From what my dad told me, it was actually quite a drive to downtown Los Angeles in those days. Now everything’s all one big urban sprawl and you can get to downtown LA in fifteen minutes by hopping on the freeway.

  Anyway, Archibald Lasher had been hung at San Quentin in September of 1928, and was buried near his family, in Gardena. Forest Green Cemetery was fairly new back then (in fact, Gardena High School wasn’t even at its present location—if you remember, it was down the street a bit at what is now Peary Jr. High School). The areas surrounding the cemetery were mostly farmland. Gardena itself wasn’t incorporated as a city until 1930.

  That was all Joel found out that afternoon, but it got us talking. Tina and I were kinda freaked out that we’d been standing over the grave of a convicted murderer. It was like standing over Jack the Ripper’s grave or something.

  A few days later we met at the cemetery, only this time we met over Archibald Lasher’s grave. That was Joel’s idea. He wanted to talk more about the murders. Tina and I didn’t want to, but Brent had some prime Acapulco Gold, and you knew me back then—that was shit I could never turn down! So, we hung out and got stoned, wondering about the man that lay below us, and the people he’d killed.

  Now a little side-trip. If you remember, Mark and Tina were banging each other, had been for a few months. A few nights before when we’d all gone out, Tina hadn’t come along and Mark and I wound up making out in the backseat of his car. I had become real attracted to him and wanted him. And I got him finally. It was around the time that we discovered who Archibald Lasher was that I think Tina started suspecting.

  Anyway, back to the story. We got real fucked up that day. Most of the talk centered on Archibald Lasher, wondering about the details of his story. Tina was really stoned, almost in a trance. She didn’t say much. Joel and Brent were talking about trying to find out more about Archibald Lasher, and Mark and I stammered at small talk. Finally we left.

  You know the rest; perhaps you were anticipating this anyway. Later that night, Tina and Mark went out and wound up at Forest Green Cemetery, at Archibald Lasher’s grave. She killed him there. Stabbed him in the chest with a dagger she’d gotten a hold of, then proceeded to stab him ninety-eight times. She left him there and started walking home. A cop saw her walking along with blood drenched all over her clothes down Artesia Boulevard, and they arrested her.

  Then she hung herself in her cell with her belt and shirt.

  I’m sure you remember when the news broke. It was the last week of school. I think that last week everybody that knew them was in shock. Christ, I think even if you didn’t know them you would have been in shock. Everybody was talking about it, more so than when they talked about that horrible car accident Joe Lopez and Chuck Miller were in earlier that year. I went ballistic; I freaked out. I remember being called out of my first class (the one I hardly ever went to; English Lit) to the principal’s office, figuring I must be getting busted for cutting school so much. Instead, a pair of detectives wanted to question me. They told me the news. I started crying and I couldn’t stop.

  They called my dad and step-mom, and they took me home and questioned us for about an hour. They asked me everything about Tina and Mark. I told them most of what I knew (leaving out the part of Mark and I screwing around, and us smoking pot at the cemetery of course—I may have been a dumb teenager back then, but I wasn’t that stupid). Later, when my dad wasn’t around, I told them about Mark and Tina being an item, and me messing around with Mark one night, and me thinking that Tina might have had suspicions and I started crying even harder, right in front of them. I had to get it off my chest, but I couldn’t do it in front of my father. I didn’t want him to think badly of me—funny to think that, even though I didn’t care much for him in the first place, if you know what I mean.

  They finally concluded that Tina killed Mark in a jealous rage, then committed suicide in her cell out of grief. That was the official verdict.

  I have since found out otherwise. Which I’ll explain further in part three.

  Later!

  Julie

  *

  Subj: What Happened at Forest Green Cemetery, Part 3

  Date: 3/14/01 7:18 PM Pacific Standard Time

  From: [email protected] (Julie Stewart)

  To: [email protected] (Jesus Gonzalez)

  Okay, now I’m going to give you my theory of what happened, and why I think it’s happening, and why I’m so scared. But first I have to remind you to SAVE THESE E-MAILS and do something with the story I’m telling you. Publish it or something. Make people aware that what has happened, what is still happening, is the truth. People need to be warned.

  Second, I think I should fill in some missing gaps. If you remember correctly, you didn’t see much of me that summer. (Okay, we saw each other at that Ozzy Osbourne concert at the Long Beach Arena, but if we saw each other again I surely don’t remember; I was probably too fucked up to notice.) When school started again in September, I was more of a waste case than I was before. I don’t even know why I went to school. I was really depressed, only I didn’t know it at the time. Poor John Burke even tried to cheer me up; he’d gotten clean and was trying to turn his life around. I remember him trying to get me to go to class. Remember that?

  To make a long story short, I never did graduate. My dad got pissed at me for my failing grades, started calling me a stupid-ass slut, and that’s when I left home. That’s the last you, or Brent, or Joel, or any of you ever saw of me. So what happened to me?

  I was going out with Daryl Martinez at the time, and I lived with him in a room his parents had made for him in their garage. Daryl was in a band, and for awhile he even played in some of the Hollywood clubs. I started hanging out on the Strip, started hanging out with bands like Motley Crue and Ratt, who were just club bands then. I started doing more drugs, harder stuff like coke and speed. Then I started dabbling in smack. Just a little at first, but then a few years later I really got into it. I wouldn’t shoot it, not at first. I was dancing by then, mostly at Bare Elegance near LAX, then at the Seventh Veil on the Strip. I went through boyfriends like you wouldn’t believe. I became a real heavy-metal chick groupie. I suppose in a way I was blaming myself for Mark and Tina’s death. But I was blind. I could not see, ha ha.

  No matter how much drugs I did, I still read a lot, mostly science fiction. (Remember when you and I were the only kids at 156th Street School that always ordered a lot of books from the Scholastic Book Club? LOL!) One of my boyfriends at the time had a computer, a Mac, and I started playing with it a lot. That’s when I first discovered the Internet. This was in 1986 or ‘87. I got into the whole cyberpunk culture thanks to that Mac and some of the science fiction I was reading (I think I read Mirrorshades until it was
falling apart). Thinking back on it, it seems kinda weird that I was doing this Internet thing way back then, huh?

  I was making good money stripping, and I was also doing some escort work—high-priced stuff. This is actually the first time I’m telling anybody this (except for my husband, Jim). I’m ashamed that I fell into that, but I needed the money, and I really didn’t have any confidence in myself. I didn’t think I could do anything else to earn money, and the only life I knew was using my body to make money, so I did. Plus, my heroin habit got ugly; I finally started shooting it, and within a few months I couldn’t even dance or work the escort scene anymore. Business executives don’t want to screw a junkie with track marks all over her arms and hands.

 

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